Player achieves Terraria flight pre-hardmode in novel manner

pcgamesn.com:

Terraria players looking to get about the indie game’s map quickly and safely will usually turn to a set of wings or one of the numerous flying Terraria mounts. Normally the options to for Terraria flight pre-hardmode are extremely limited, but one player stumbled into a fun way to traverse the world without the need for any specific equipment.

Almost every instance of Terraria wings and flight-capable mounts are restricted to the survival game’s ‘hardmode’ state. This requires you to progress far enough and then defeat one of the key Terraria bosses to change the world state into its second, tougher form. While players can use rocket boots from the goblin tinkerer for a brief burst of airtime pre-hardmode, one particularly resourceful person found a more novel alternative.

Reddit user CautiousIce5411 shared a clip (credited to a friend) in which the player character is busily building out a platform network (commonly used to make boss encounters easier) when they are approached by a balloon slime. As the slime bumps into the player, the slight knockback sends them on a perfect trajectory to bounce repeatedly off the slime’s… back (do slimes have backs?), causing it to juggle them gently through the air.

If you’re looking to take advantage of this method yourself, note that it requires fairly specific conditions. The windy balloon was introduced in Terraria 1.4 and is an otherwise-harmless enemy that will carry a slime gently through the skies. It will pop if the player hits it or gets too close, so you must ‘ride’ the slime at the perfect angle to avoid bursting the balloon that carries it.

As noted by Terraria QA specialist Leinfors, bouncing on enemies repeatedly isn’t an especially safe method, as most enemies will